Amidst a variety of conceptual perspectives on society-state relations in the Arab world in general and the Arabian Gulf region in particular, scholars in the field have generally converged around a common conclusion that societies in the Gulf region have become a pivotal site for shaping state policy, attitude and practices. Not only have social, civic and popular forces developed, expanded and assumed new forms, they have become a crucial source for state contestation, legitimacy and influence. However, and notwithstanding the new and emerging research on society and politics of the region, the literature on this topic remains predominantly state-centered with great focus on the regulative, extractive and distributive capacity of the state. Based on this analytical approach, the literature in the field has typically assumed a sharp epistemological distinction between state, culture and society in the region. Further complicating this analytical process of the region is the emergence and presence of a gap between Anglophone literature and Arabophone literature in the field. For some scholars and observers in the region, there have been diverging scholarly and research interests between the formal political and structural analysis (as expressed in some Eurocentric Anglophone literature) and the popular socio-political analysis that is captured in print media, new media, and blog narratives and often expressed in Arabic. Dissatisfied with these analytical gaps and methodological disjunctures, this workshop focuses on more nuanced and more multifaceted conceptualizations of relations between state and society in the Arabian Gulf region. More specifically, the aim of this workshop is to examine the strategies and dynamics through which state-society relations in the Arabian Gulf region have been cultivated and to explore the alternative political, social, economic and popular changes that threaten those relations. More critically, the workshop seeks to understand how state sovereignty has been shifting to accommodate internal social, cultural, and intellectual forces and how these forces have been able to balance social and political powers in order to function within and coexist alongside the state. While the field of society-state relations is a vast and multilayered research area, the workshop will primarily focus on the following three topics: religion and the state (formal and informal institutions, institutional religious scholars, popular religious personalities, and Fatwa discourse on public policy), the role of the intellectual, public discourse and the state (the role of the organic intellectual, traditional intellectual, and public intellectuals), and networked public sphere and state (youth culture, blogging, and gender movements). The focus of this workshop extends the Gulf Research Meeting’s discussion on the possibilities and limits of civil society in the Gulf region as well as the discussions on media and soft power in the Gulf, but goes beyond them in that it explicitly seeks interdisciplinary research from numerous fields that reveal critical aspects of state-society relations that cannot be fully identified by conventional approaches of the traditional state-society distinction.